Nazareth's Pete Agnew on 30 years of gigs in Russia and Ukraine

They had gigs lined up for 14 cities as well as dates in Ukraine in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Zaporozhye, places that people in West Fife were probably unfamiliar with until the horrifying scenes of the conflict started filling our TV screens.

Over the past 30 years, Nazareth have played Moscow 51 times, more than they have anywhere else, making friends and music as they toured the country and its neighbouring states extensively.

It's given the band's founding member, Pete Agnew, a rare insight into the people and places in that part of the world and why it's so hard to see what's going on now.

The 75-year-old told the Press: "The last tour we did before the COVID lockdown in 2020 had the first show in Kyiv and the second one in Moscow.

"We spent time with all our old friends then parted, making promises to keep in touch and looking forward to our next visits.

"Looking back now to what was a happy memory, it’s hard to believe how quickly everything changed.

"I have never been a fan of social media in the past but it has become indispensable in getting and giving information during this disaster unfolding in Ukraine."

Pete continued: "Our pals in Russia are being fed mainly lies and massive distortions of truth regarding events in Ukraine by the state TV but thanks to social media, the apps the Kremlin hasn’t managed to cancel, they are still in touch with us and others and getting a world view.

"These guys know they are being fed bull by their media that isn’t even referring to this as a war.

"They are just as horrified as we are at what’s going on in their name.

"Our friends in Ukraine are mainly in Kyiv and are either shouldering guns or working in some other defensive role but they are keeping us up to speed with what exactly is going on.

"One young lady, one of our friends who came to Dunfermline and stayed in the City Hotel, told us from the bunker she was sheltering in last Thursday that she needed her guys to win the war quick because she had her work to go to on Monday.

"Brave lady with a sense of humour still intact. And she makes a mean Molotov cocktail."

Events following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 opened up possibilities for bands to travel behind the Iron Curtain and play in the what was then the Soviet Union.

Within a month, they were contacted by the main agency in Moscow for artistic cultural exchanges.

"The UK got the Bolshoi Ballet, Russia got Nazareth. Quite the cultural exchange," Pete said.

They gigged there so extensively over the next 30 years, playing massive cities that very few people had heard of, like Samara, Omsk, Krasnoyarsk and Khabarovsk, that led to the journalist's quip that "Nazareth have probably visited more Russian cities than Putin."

They didn't cross paths with the Russian leader – though they came close: "We’ve never met Putin but one night after playing a show in the Moscow Kremlin, we were stopped from leaving and told to park the minibus that was taking us back to our hotel and wait till some official cars left," Pete recalled.

"Turns out that Putin and his mob were having a meeting and it was finishing up but we still had to wait 45 minutes before the cars came by.

"Due to having several post-show cocktails in the dressing room, the waiting for him to pass proved too long for some band and crew members who were forced to wash different parts of the Kremlin wall.

"‘Ten years in a camp’ was crossing my mind at the time but when you gotta go you gotta go!"

Pete continued: "After the first few visits to Russia, we rarely did a tour there without including Ukraine in the schedule.

"We made many friends, especially people who started out as interpreters who travelled everywhere with us and became very close.

"So close, in fact, that we brought some of them (both Russian and Ukrainian) to Dunfermline for visits where they made new friends.

"We toured both of these countries together so often that it was easy to think of them all as being the same people.

"We know they’re not but it felt like that to us and that’s what makes it so hard to accept what’s happening now."

The invite to tour what was then the USSR back in 1990 didn't surprise Pete, as they'd heard they were hugely popular over there.

Naz had reportedly sold four million records – albeit most were bootlegs – and "they treated us like we were The Beatles".

The band couldn't quite work out why they were so popular but Pete discovered, at their first press conference in the Moscow Olympic Hall in front of 400 journalists, there was a "bit of a back story".

He said: "Seemingly, there was a story going around in Russia that the name ‘Agnew’ was really an Anglicised version of ‘Agnev’ and that my dad had got the family out of Russia when I was two-years-old and I was a wee Russian who started Nazareth!

"I assured everyone that my dad was born in Damside Street (it no longer exists) in Dunfermline and I was born in Burns Street but when a story like that starts doing the rounds it tends to grow legs so it never really completely went away.

"It certainly didn’t do our reputation any harm so here’s to wee Agnev!"

On that first visit in February 1990, they played 10 shows at the 18,000-capacity Olympic Hall in Moscow and another 14 in the 14,000-capacity venue in Leningrad (now St Petersburg).

Pete said: "When bands say, 'We did a Russian tour' they usually mean they played Moscow and St Petersburg.

"When we toured Russia we played their Cowdenbeaths, Cumbernaulds and Carlisles as well as the big cities. Sometimes, we were the first Westerners they'd ever seen.

"We've played as far east as Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula, we've actually played there four times, more than we have in Perth or Kirkcaldy."

On that first tour, they drove by Pushkin Square and saw a queue of around 6,000 people – the opening of Russia's first McDonald's restaurant.

Pete said: "I remember thinking they had a better chance of getting a Big Mac than they had of getting democracy.

"They closed that McDonald's last week due to the sanctions."

Pete said there had been a ban on rock music in Russia and, at a press conference in Yekaterinburg some years later, he found out how seriously they took it.

Through an interpreter, a woman explained she had been a radio DJ during the 1970s and decided to play their album, 'Rampant'.

He said: "She locked the main doors to the building then locked her studio door and basically barricaded herself in.

"She managed to play a whole side of the album before the police broke in and took her away.

"She was given two months in jail but could easily have been sent to a camp for a much longer sentence."

He added: "It’s very easy in Russia even now to get yourself banged up in Siberia.

"You’ve seen the footage on TV recently of folk being arrested for demonstrating and you’re being told they are threatened with 10 years.

"And when they say 10 years, they mean 10 years."

For now, Pete is at home in Dunfermline, watching the news the same as everyone else and hoping for a peaceful resolution: "One of my good friends in Moscow told me, the last time I spoke to him: “I’d rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.

"Let’s hope our Ukrainian pals can give it a jolt and shake Putin off so they can get back to work on Monday."